Scale up of reactors for carbon dioxide reduction

Abstract

In recent times there has been a great deal of interest in the conversion of carbon dioxide into more useful chemical compounds. On the other hand, the translation of these developments in electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide from the laboratory bench to practical scale remains an underexplored topic. Here we examine some of the major challenges, demonstrating some promising strategies towards such scale-up, including increased electrode area and stacking of electrode pairs in different configurations. We observed that increasing the electrode area from 1 to 10 cm² led to only a 4% drop in current density, with similarly small penalties realised when stacking sub-cells together.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

CO₂ reduction / electrochemical cell / electrosynthesis / upscaling

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Acknowledgements

Funding from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence Scheme (Project Number CE 140100012) is gratefully acknowledged. The authors would like to thank Benjamin Filippi from Translational Research Initiative for Cell Engineering and Printing (TRICEP) for technical support, and the Australian National Nanofabrication Facility-Materials node for equipment use.

Electronic Supplementary Material

Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11705-022-2178-7 and is accessible for authorized users.

Funding Note

Open Access funding enabled and organized by CAUL and its Member Institutions.

Open Access

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2022 The Author(s). This article is published with open access at link.springer.com and journal.hep.com.cn